Features

The Bradford City fire disaster. The Kenilworth Road riots between Luton Town and Milwall fans. Hooliganism, Heysel, Hillsborough. These are some of the darker images that linger in the mind when we think of football in the 1980s when the reputation of British football fans had sunk so low that they had apparently seeped […]

“There are moments in football that are exclusively poetic: these are the moments of the “goal.” Each goal is always an invention, it is always a subversion of the code: each goal is an inevitability, shock, awe, irreversibility. Just like the word poetic. The top scorer of the league is always the best poet of […]

Paddy Moore was born in 1909 in Ballybough Co. Dublin, just north of the traditional socio-geographic dividing line of Ireland’s capital, the River Liffey. Although those lines of class division have blurred a little in recent years, the general rule is if you are born north of the river you are working class and if […]

What do you get out of football and sport in general? Apart from the obvious emotional tube-ride we enjoy with the masses, the thrills and the spills, running the gamut of agonisingly unjust defeats and those invigorating derby day victories, that semi-sadomasochistic pleasure and pain that is indiscriminately doled out by the football gods during […]

As football fans, I’d imagine you will all be familiar with that feeling you get when you watch a young player for the first time who seems destined for great things – it’s a weird feeling of inarguable self-certainty. You just know. It’s not a feeling you get all that often, but after just 45 […]

As you may know, I previously wrote an article exploring womenʼs roles in top level sport which pulled no punches. It went down a treat in some camps and not so well in others. I have been referred to as sexist and anti-feminist ever since. This may or may not be entirely true but in […]

In March of this year the world of Tennis was rocked with news that 5 time grand slam champion and former World Number 1 Maria Sharapova had tested positive for a banned substance. BBC tennis commentator Andrew Castle described the news as a hammer blow to the sport of tennis. Even that may be an […]

‘A picture paints a thousand words’ is probably the most idiotic idiom every verbalised. I’m not being facetious when I say it just never made any sense to me. What’s a picture without context? Without some background information? A picture/photograph wrangles and captures a split second from time times infinity. Why restrict and condense a […]

We’re in the middle of March, and that can only mean one thing, we’re also in the middle of Arsenal’s annual “season in crisis” patch of form. Knocked out of the FA at the weekend, on the verge of being knocked out of the Champions League at the last 16 stage yet again, and only […]